When we talk about PR we rarely contemplate the complexity of the profession.  Often PR is about taking a position on an issue, creating claim in a crisis or creating the personality for a brand.  Most importantly PR is about spreading your story.

PR companies often complain that their role is misunderstood as clients think it is about getting column inches but yet at the end of the quarter they present their clients with press clippings as the measurement of their success fueling the misconception.  In a period of tumbling readership of print publications isn’t it time that we looked at online PR and understood why it often trumps the importance of the traditional column inch?

The 10 Tips and Reasons:

1.    Wider audience: Many traditional print publications have a reach limited by geographic boundaries.   Their online readership is frequently much greater than their printed circulation therefore an online press release can reach a wider global audience than the printed version. Settling for the fact that your printed story will appear on a website is not sufficient.  It rarely translates well to online where readers consume information and behave differently.  Your online PR needs to be written for an online audience.

2.    Easier to gain prominence: The digital editor of a publication is looking for more than a story and photo.  They want multiple photos or video or even competitions or dialogue that encourages interactivity.  The digital editor has different needs and is hungry for interactive content.  Feed that hunger and be rewarded with more prominent coverage.

3.    The story continues: Combine your online PR with online advertising and insist on links back to specifically designed pages on your website where the conversation continues and the attention generated by the article rewards both the reader and you.

Yesterdays offline PR

4.    Archived Content: Today’s column inches are tomorrows chip wrappers (did chip shops really wrap their produce in newspapers?). The point is that your online PR with the peer reviewed publication or popular notice boards or blog will be archived and reproduced as a result within search engines.  Future searches will reveal your past online PR efforts, especially those that had some level of engagement.

5.    Create Google Juice! That’s the term used to describe the power of an inbound link from a peer-reviewed publication. Google (and others) looks at the quality of the publication; a peer-reviewed publication often holds lots of juice, and gives your site Google juice by linking to it helping your search engine performance for that topic.  Get enough links from well-respected publications and you will top Google ahead of competitors with random low scoring inbound links.

6.    Totally traceable ROI: Links clicks, videos watched, contacts made…real tangible outcomes are measured from online PR.  The guesswork on your Return On Investment calculations is made simple.

7.    Niche Marketing: Weddings Online gets 4.5 million page impressions per month, that’s as much as most national newspapers and has over 1000 brides signing up in the same period.  Each bride spends around 4 hours per week on the site.  If you want to reach the wedding market in Ireland, this is the way.

Sugahfix 28,000 21 to 45 year olds interested in fashion in Ireland actively receiving fashion tips per week, while nitechblog.com has 500 top CTO’s in Ireland as frequent readers.

These online publications have massive reach within their niche, something generalist print magazines don’t have. Add in the interactivity they produce with forums and blogs and these publications are the new powerhouse for reaching and talking to your perspective clients.

Get your online PR strategy right and find a low cost, high impact route to your audience.  Combine it with online advertising spend and BINGO!

8.    Old talents – new platform: Don’t be distracted by the technology focused PR agent that doesn’t have the talent to tell your story well.  Poor stories travel equally as bad online as they do offline.  Select your PR agency based upon PR credentials not their technology know how.  Companies like Ion, DCP, Weber Shandwick and CMPR for example, have both virtues.

9.    Multimedia will increase chances of success: If your PR happens to contain video it stands a substantially higher chance of improving engagement, can quickly overcome trust issues and the investment in video can be reused in email marketing and many other online points of contact.  The digital editor is more likely to run with the content also as long as it enhances the story and doesn’t look like an ad!

10.    Combine and conquer: Any marketing strategy requires multiple channels of activity. If your marketing strategy includes above-the-line elements as well as below-the-line, the combined effect of the activities will be greater than the sum of their parts.

Your customer is increasingly taking their guidance from online research therefore it is imperative than your attention if focused on creating influence in this area.  Make online PR a central part of your overall marketing strategy, not a footnote.

The traditional daily newspaper is in trouble.  Advertising revenues are in steep decline along with copy sales as the internet causes major disruption to print, one of the oldest forms of existing mass media.  If however we as marketers grasped the value of online peer review coverage, would we pay for the privilege of outbound links from newspaper websites in our published PR articles?

A regional newspaper may for example have an ABC audited readership of around 70,000.  On the other hand, the online version of the publication has around 1 million unique viewers each month.  Tradition would have it that if you make the print version, you are pretty sure to make the online version for stories of reasonable resonance with the reader.  This may not feel like you got double the bang for your buck, but consider a scenario whereby you got your embedded video along with an outbound link to a landing page dedicated to the article published in the online version of the newspaper.  This is a small example of Online PR and the implications are massive.

Firstly having peer review publications linking to your website will help your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Next, your article will be stored and indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo! meaning your PR article has perpetual use and relevance and can be found in the future.  Third your PR is seen by people overseas and outside the normal distribution demographic of the print publication giving your extend reach.  Finally you can track with total accuracy the number of inquiries created, videos watched and links clicked without the aid of third party services.  In other words, you can see if you get Return On Investment (ROI)  for your marketing spend.

With all this in mind, would you still prefer column inches to page impressions? Would you pay to have the privilege of having your video embedded in the article and would you pay to have an outbound link to your website from the newspaper website?  So if the economic model of online display ads is not working for newspapers, could charging for enhanced online PR fill the gap?

PR agencies are benefiting out of this recession, but much of this success will be short lived.  In my recent blog entry the death of the newspaper is nigh, I argue that the newspaper is in terminal decline, a fact that most journalists and newspaper owners I talk to don’t deny.

At the moment, many newspapers are not replacing or recruiting journalists because of their ever declining copy sales and reduced ad revenues.  As a result, a short-lived opportunity has popped up for PR companies to help the newspaper editors fill their pages – copy is often skewed to promote a product or service and real investigative journalism is being replaced by less interesting corporate content.  This action will only accelerate the decline of the paper in the long term, but in the short term, it allows PR agencies to cash in at the same time as keeping their customers happy.

But what happens when the newspapers start to go under?  What happens when companies, charities and political parties come to the realisation that their customers are no longer taking opinion from newspapers but online?  How many PR agencies and marketing departments are prepared? I believe it is only a matter of time before the PR bubble bursts.  The only PR agencies that will grow are those which understand how to socialise online.
 

Face facts…the newspaper as a means of speeding the news or opinion is dead.  I declare that within the lifetime of most readers of this blog, we will see the end of the commercial daily newspaper as we know it.

I base this on fact and not hunch.  Ten years ago, the UK Sunday newspaper circulation was twice what it is today.  Out of the 60+ daily UK titles, only a few held audience figures last year and most experienced declines in readership of around 6%.  Give it another ten years and the readerships will have at least halved again.  The irony is…we are consuming more news now than ever before, but using the web to do it.

Worse news is that newspapers don’t make a huge pile of revenue from copy sales, they make it from advertising.  How many people now go to their newspaper when looking for a car, holiday, job or even a date?  All of this advertising revenue has moved online and the newspapers are doing a bad job of capturing the online spend.  They use the old traditional advertising models and simply try to shift them to the internet.  It’s time they restructured and got creative.

In previous newspaper dips, the pundits talked about cycles.  Do they really think that all of the advertising spend will come back?  With lower copy sales, falling advertising revenues and changing habits where readers demand up to the minute news on the mobile phone or across a myriad of devices, how will newsprint survive?  The answer is it won’t.  

“TV and radio both survived, one didn’t replace the other,” I hear you say.  But I ask you how many people still used the horse and cart once motor transport became popular?  The newspaper is the old horse we love and have an emotional attachment toward but I fear we must face its ever-imminent demise.